PITY THE POOR SNOWFLAKES:

Republican voters' hostility to teaching Black history in school did not happen overnight but has been building over the past two decades. As Michael Tesler, a political science professor at the University of California at Irvine noted in a 2018 analysis for The Washington Post, in 2000, the percentage of Americans who thought too much Black history was being taught in public schools was in the single digits for Democrats and in the single digits for Republicans. Tesler noted that "Democrats haven't changed in the past two decades. Republicans, however, are now 30 points more likely to say schools should teach less black history."  

For that analysis, Tesler also cited a February 2018 poll which found that a third of people who'd voted for Donald Trump in 2016 believed "American children should solely be taught about Western civilization and European / US History."

Why do so many white Republicans oppose teaching about Black history and racism? Recent polls that find white Republicans are increasingly describing themselves as being equally subject to discrimination as people of color. In 2015, only 38% of white Republicans responded that white people face a lot of discrimination. That's the year that Trump lauched a presidential campaign that was also a white grievance campaign. More recent polls suggest a massive change. Last year, CNN referred to the work of Emily Ekins of The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. She found that 73% of those who voted for Trump in 2020 believe "today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities."

This rise of perceived white victimhood in the GOP helps explain why DeSantis is publicly defending the ban on the AP African American studies course, claiming that somehow the course "is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids."

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